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An anonymous reader writes to mention that Microsoft has rolled out a preview version of their Bing Search site earlier than expected. Microsoft's hope at putting a dent in Google's ubiquitous search presence, Bing has several new features including Bing Cashback, Bing Video, and Bing xRank. "Bing Video is really great because of the new thumbnail video feature. Try searching for E3 at Bing Video and you'll quickly see how it works. Simply hover over a video and it starts playing instantly. This is fantastic from the consumer's point of view but what about the publisher? It's almost like Microsoft is stepping on their toes by deploying video search in this manner. Would a user still click on to the site if they can watch the whole video from within the search results? Fair use definitely comes into mind here. Perhaps there should be a 30second limitation on the 'thumbnail preview?'"

What's interesting, for me, about other search engines and their "usability" is the fact that my eyes are trained to parse google results. Google search results look official and informative. I can't use Yahoo or MSN (or Bing for this matter) because their search results look sterile.

Sometimes it's the lack of information- as little as giving me the page size (7kb). Sometimes it's the margins. Bing has a left margin. Google doesn't.

I'm not saying that these differences make a BAD difference, except this: Internet users learn quickly about scams. The first time I accidentally clicked on those fake search results on an ad-search mis-direction page, I learned to pick up on these differences quickly.

In fact, it's subtle, but you can usually tell when a computer has an infection that hijacks your google results- because they don't look right (older infections changed the results, new ones redirect REAL results.. but that's a different conversation).

The point is- my mouse won't go near, let alone click, on things that I think are tricks or advertisements. For some reason, I trust google a lot. So much that my eyes are trained to see it's results and disregard others. I'm reluctant to click on bing results.

I encourage slashdot users to try bing out, and tell me it doesn't look foreign to you! Tell me you don't feel weird clicking it's results! The internet trains you quickly that you are to embrace familiarity, because you will be quickly punished for not doing so.

I encourage slashdot users to try bing out, and tell me it doesn't look foreign to you! Tell me you don't feel weird clicking it's results! The internet trains you quickly that you are to embrace familiarity, because you will be quickly punished for not doing so.

I understand what you're saying, but I have a different perspective. Yes, the results page looks different to me but in fact that has meant I've paid more attention to it. I've been trying this out every so often and it's looking promising. Wish they'd get rid of the picture from the front page, but other than that I think I'm going to stick with this for a while. Its "Pages from the UK only" thing (insert your country here...) seems much more accurate than google.co.uk's, for instance. I might be imagining it, but it seems that way to me so far.

My current homepage is google.co.uk. I'm going to set bing.com as my homepage for a week to see how I get on with it - so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites, so looking promising at first glance. I'll see how it truly is after a longer term test.

so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites

Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again.

I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping to be about as good as Google's, nothing special. Could definitely do without the noisy background, though. I crave simplicity!

"so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites"
Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again.
Oh yes, I completely agree. It took a while for Google to become so spam-infested though, so hopefully we get a reasonable break in the meantime.
I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping to be about as good as Google's, nothing special. Could definitely do without the noisy background, though. I crave simplicity!
Indeed. Is actually the one thing putting me off making it my homepage, but I'm going to do it just to give things a try. Have been less satisfied with Google of late - not necessarily their fault as such, but there's so much targeting of them that's it's getting harder to sort wheat from chaff.
Cheers,
Ian

Maybe the best defense against the spammer is multiple successful search engines owned and operated by different companies. In other words, I don't like the idea of a Google monoculture any more than I like the Windows monoculture and the instant widespread success of malware that it enables. With spammers and others who want to "game" the search engines, it seems to me that the same principle applies.

Some of the things I use quite a bit on google search are the calculator feature, as well as just asking a basic trivia question that comes up while I'm browsing. Both such examples fail on bing. "1+1=?" returned a bunch of nonsense, which is expected because bing doesn't have a calculator, but "How tall is Steve Nash?" returned his stats in the first result with a picture, which is nice, but it is not his height. You have to look to the third result to see how tall he is. Google on the other hand returns t

What's interesting, for me, about other search engines and their "usability" is the fact that my eyes are trained to parse google results. Google search results look official and informative. I can't use Yahoo or MSN (or Bing for this matter) because their search results look sterile.

I just tried Bing (Did Chandler approve of this?) and it does look like Google, with the exception of the left border as you state (and that weird mouseover line-with-a-dot on the right hand side)

They look pretty similar to me. I know what you are talking about, but Bing does a pretty good job of mimicking Google.

I did the "cheeseburger" test on it - if on Google, I search for Cheeseburger and the first page of links are all people trying to get me to buy cheeseburgers, I know Google's evilling up the results. If on the other hand I get all kinds of cool interesting things about cheeseburgers, I know I'm getting the "truth."

The result sets look almost the same to me and the output is bland enough.

The left border definitely gives it a spammy feel. If I came across a Bing results page unexpectedly I'd probably mistake it for a link farm and immediately close it by mouse gesture without even reading anything. Would take less than a second.

I really liked Alta Vista also - when it supported boolean queries with the NEAR keyword. I really miss that NEAR keyword, it could transform a search so easily into something worthwhile. When Alta Vista morphed into a yet another Google-style search, I moved to Google.

I really liked Alta Vista also - when it supported boolean queries with the NEAR keyword. I really miss that NEAR keyword, it could transform a search so easily into something worthwhile. When Alta Vista morphed into a yet another Google-style search, I moved to Google.

I remember that. I used to use Altavista back when the URL was altavista.digital.com and back in the day it was great.

That's one reason why I never liked MSN Live and other MS search products. They're obviously very biased towards Microsoft products. Google, if anything, is biased towards open source & their other offerings like gmail, etc. but their search results aren't so blatantly biased that way. I purposely don't want to use a search engine run by a corporation with a wide range of products and services like MS because it's so easy for them to game the results to suit their needs. That's why I stick with Google for most of my searching and venture out to others like ask.com, yahoo.com, etc. when I want to try something different. Unless MS can demonstrate that their searches aren't biased towards their products & services then I'll continue to avoid using them.

This bias, built from MS's search seeing the world as highly MS-leaning from simply their own adherents using their products more, is somewhat self-defeating.

For popularity-driven ranks, the wider the audience and usage, the better the full audience will be able to make use of the statistics it employs. If MS's employees, contractors, proponents, vendors, etc are the primary users for the tool before a general web world, the stats will be be slanted towards MS's offerings, as you allude.

I would expect for a release as important as this to the MS portfolio, I would expect them to reset the statistics after the initial rollout, or even sub-sample the IP's, selecting for diversity, for the stats to fight bias. Without this, I can only wait until another set of "MS is just pushing more MS" posts across the blogosphere.

Then again, perhaps a healthy dose of bing-bombing (aka google-bombing) the site will re-skew it to those who fight such battles.

AFAIK, suggested results are generated by going through what users have already searched for. It's quite likely that a pre-beta search engine, which has so far been prominently used by Microsoft employees or partners would have a "bias" towards Windows.
Looks like most of these people have been looking for Linux and Windows comparisons instead trying to download Linux.

Bing's OK. But it's nothing special. Even if it's technically superior in certain ways to Google--I can't tell so I'll leave that for the intellectuals to tease out--there's no particular reason to switch.

I have NEVER had a problem finding stuff on Google. Usually what I'm looking for appears in the first 10 hits. About 10% of the time, I need to rephrase my search, or add some "-" keywords to weed out some signal noise. But Google does the job, I'm used to it, and it seems to just keep getting better.

There is so much power hidden inside Google's engine--stock quotes, mathematical calculations, language translation, mapping, document conversion, caches of deleted pages, paid links that I actually find useful, typo correction--the list goes on and on and on!

What can Microsoft's search engine add to this stunningly rich resource that millions of us can't live without? What killer features does Microsoft give us? Some little tweaks here and there in the UI that may or may not make much difference. Some good ideas on supplemental information such as the "related searches" column on the left.

Sorry, Microsoft, but Bing looks like MSN Search that's been tweaked a little. If Google didn't exist, you might have a winner on your hands, but this is just another "me, too" search system that will survive only as a niche product, funded by profits from the MS Office and Windows divisions.

Any market penetration by Bing will probably come from super-glueing it to the Windows 7 desktop and Windows mobile handhelds, defaulting it on IE searching, and otherwise forcing it down customers' throats in whatever way they can, hoping a large enough population will be ignorant enough to just use the defaults. But now that "google" is a verb in the dictionary, Microsoft has its work cut out for it to hold and expand its little piece of the search market.

I've always avoided Live search and its predecessors because they're fucking useless.

I was wondering if they'd made this new search engine less fucking useless. Obviously they haven't.

It's a shame they didn't learn anything with the Vista debacle -- it doesn't matter how much you spend on marketing if your product is shit. It's still shit, and unless you're selling to farmers who actually want to buy shit, you're not going to sell your shit to anyone.

What first impress me is the huge amount of ads in the search results. Searching for "sql server [bing.com]" I can only see two real results before having to scroll the page and is hard to distinguish the ads on the top of the page, from the real results.

If I'd hit your link on accident I'd have assumed it was just another domineer squatting a high value (?) name. Who ever designed the page layout probably doesn't know the first thing about composition, my eyes can't seem to decide where to focus because all the blocks seem to be competing. Like an uglier version of google with over 1/3 of the top of the page (all you see before scrolling) dedicated to advertisements with not one, but TWO search boxes (the second simply to search within microsoft.com) which will probably frustrate and confuse as many users as it might help.

Ok, seriously... what's with that 80 KiB background JPEG on the homepage?

Image search is actually nice, though I would put the filters at the top instead of the left. The results leave a bit to be desired (tried "portable mame cabinet", hoping to find something I looked at a few days ago - no luck there). Also, scrolling down loads more pictures automatically. No need to go to "page 2" for more results. That's actually nice. The size/weight info on hover is a nice touch too.

I realized just now that if some other company had started up and created a new search engine called "Bing" I would probably find it really charming. But when Microsoft does it, it just seems like The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show. The human subconscious is a player-hater.

Maybe Microsoft can take all that money they spend rebranding their useless shitty search engine every 2 years and build a good search engine? I don't care what they're calling MSN Messenger this week, it's a great product and I keep using it despite the constant name changes. Similarly, I don't care what they call Live Search or Bing or MSN Search or whatever they want to call it this week, it's shit and it's going to remain shit until

When I moused over video results, it seemed to do "skip play", fading out and in between jumps, as it "sampled" the video in 7 second clips. After 3 clips (from throughout a 20 minute video), it looped. Very nice for getting a feel for the video contents and quality.

So I don't understand the beef about "Would a user still click on to the site if they can watch the whole video from within the search results?" because the user clearly can't watch the whole video from the search results.

I also rather like the image results, I can't speak for the actual images themselves, but the way they're presented is so much nicer than Google with a convenient dynamic load as you continue scrolling down the page. Live search did this too.

Error #2044: Unhandled AsyncErrorEvent:. text=Error #2095: SmartPreviewNetStream was unable to invoke callback onMetaData. error=ReferenceError: Error #1069: Property onMetaData not found on SmartPreviewNetStream and there is no default value. at SmartPreview()
at SmartPreview_fla::MainTimeline/frame1()

I guess nobody at MS tested their results with the debug version of Flash Player?

I predict this will be every bit as useful and well received as other Microsoft innovations like Microsoft Soundsmith and Bob! I'm sure plenty of people will use it just as long as they are paid to do so... but that isn't a very viable business model for a search engine.

Typical MSFT logic again. The official blog describes 'Bing' as "the sound of found". Problem is - I haven't started looking for anything yet, WHY IS THERE A SOUND? Furthermore, even MSFT admit that to compete with Google you need a name that can become a verb - so WHY DID THEY DESCRIBE 'BING' AS OFFICIALLY A SOUND (which is a noun)?? And then the name keeping chiming in your head - Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing! - like a bad commercial jingle that is stuck there and makes you hate it, despise it, and swear never to touch it - no matter how good it actually is. I'm guessing that would be roughly 50% of the population that MSFT still will not convince.

Anyone else notice this ?
some users of IE6, including yours truely, have had their systems "Hijacked" by Bing. No matter what registry settings are switched, Bing has become the default search engine. We cannot "Customise" the search settings. I wonder how many others have this problem or if anyone has a solution.
Hopefully Slashdot will pick up on my story below (help me out, and comment on it)
http://slashdot.org/submission/1011681/Microsoft-Forcing-Bing-on-Users [slashdot.org]

It's a mistake - that's all. If you read the Google thread you linked to, you'd see that it happens because auto.search.msn.com handles "address bar search" and uses the "prov" parameter to decide where to send it. The new engine doesn't handle the "prov" parameter, which no doubt they'll fix. They're not intentionally hijacking anything. In fact, they're not even hijacking anything!

At least with startups like Cuil those quick bursts let devs install an air hockey table and beanbags in their office, or even go through lots of blow and hookers, and feel the rush of knowing your going to be the next Google (before it all comes crashing down, of course). Meanwhile, over at Microsoft the launch of a new technology isn't changing anyone's lives.

I also liked the mouse-over preview. It is badly needed in Google. Sometimes I have to click on tens of search results in Google just to close them right away. Considering that sometimes linked websites are quite slow, this process of click, quick look, close could be very boring.
The results so far are comparable to Google to me. I'm going to use it for a while to evaluate it better but so far it is promising.